I have a Quest 2, and I only held off on getting a Quest 3 because I don't want to keep giving money to Meta unless they made something game-changing.
Given that rhythm games are the primary purpose of my Quest 2, I think this settles me on the Steam Frame as my next headset. It runs Linux and plays games I already own.
Unfortunately, the "watch movies one inch from your eyeballs", or "block out the world at a coffee shop to check your email", or "emotionlessly watch basketball in the middle of the court" are not good selling points for me.
When someone gets this right I do think we're all gonna ditch the 2d screens and phones.
It doesn't even matter if it's Meta that instigates this, if money is smelled there will be more consumer friendly alternatives popping up overnight (e.g. see how quickly the industry copied the iPhone).
I’m still buying this for myself. I enjoy the private movie theater experience and turning every video game session into a decent cardio workout; I’ve lost 60 lbs with VR to date.
I have found VR an easy way to get moving in a fun/low friction way at the end of the day, instead of heading somewhere else. Depending on what you are doing, it isn't going to cover everything, but moving something is better than nothing.
Personally, I found Synth Riders a good way to queue up 60min continous activity that I enjoy.
For me the biggest calorie burners are boxing games. Beat Saber and others like Synth Riders are great too. Then there are fitness focus apps like Body Combat and even one for rowing machines.
Hopefully, Meta can convince HR firms that this is a fitness device that is eligible for FSA like benefits.
I understand this is quite good, but I also have something like 20/12.5 eyesight. To me, using these things feels like looking through a coarse screen door.
E: For reference, I can comfortably count pixels on a 24.5" 1080p screen from a normal seated position.
I've been buying HMDs since the first Oculus, and I promptly sell them to somebody else. 37 PPD is a little more than halfway to "perfect" for someone with 20/20 eyesight
Doing more with a narrower field of view is easy, it is even cheaper. Doing more with the same or better field of view means you need more pixels and more computing power to drive them, so more expensive, heavier hardware that gets hotter and with less battery life.
People at Meta consitered 37 PPD to be a good compromise, and I kind of agree.
This is mostly driven by the fact that even in the current optimal case where they can maintain the number of defective pixels per panel, multiplying the number of pixels tanks bins. And then the follow on effects of longevity based on heat/brightness vs refresh rate, which improves generation over generation much faster than the former. The shit they're doing to print OLED panels out like an inkjet is exciting because once it gets good enough they will no longer need to write off the failures and will be able to selectively remove or overwrite the defects, which is not something that can usefully be done with other screen types.
The operation of switching the pixels themselves becomes increasingly inexpensive as they get smaller. For a long time the biggest barrier holding progress back was consistently and reliably being able to deliver smaller and more precise voltage swings. Almost all of the increased power consumption comes from either how much less backlight can make it through (which also becomes heat, this is already enough of a problem that certain display types include a separate extremely tiny panel that sits there and displays nothing so that they can be measured to adjust the voltage levels and termination resistances), or how bright each individual pixel can be. That's why the first 6? generations of OLED panels have so many wacky and (IMHO goddamn abhorrent) arrangements of R/G/B/W shapes and subpixels.
I was vaguely okay with this when they started doing things like including yellow/magenta subpixels on TVs but anything other than a square pixel aspect ratio for computers is so gross. Even if you're willing to ignore the fringing or outright cannot see it, I can still tell one generation of iPhone apart from another consistently in books.app with the smallest white on black text, the leading/trailing edges of the letters have different rainbows.
And displaying fractionally lower resolutions onto high dpi displays does not incur much of a cost at all, retina displays existing at all on mobile phones is proof of this.
What in the world are you using as your benchmark to call 37 “dogshit”?
I had Meta Raybans for a while and liked them. Always refusing firmware updates. Everything I needed worked fine, normal headset for listening podcasts on walks, taking occasional picture, that's all I need! In this use case battery lasted a week outside of its case. Until recently it started prompting me with voice to update the glasses urgently every half an hour. And I did (to version 128, hey, even number!) and oh boy, Meta AI this Meta AI that everything is Meta AI can't do anything without it. Battery is drained in less than a day of me not wearing them, bluetooth audio breaks up all the time, connection getting lost. I was perfectly happy with the product and they had to ruin it to shove their AI garbage down my throat.
They recently added Meta AI sidebar to WhatsApp which you can't turn off.
So, hope you like Mark's AI because you'll sure have to use it with these.
So yeah, be careful of the play area. :)
Obligatory subreddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/VRtoER/